TMFBent (99.81)

Everybody Hates Imus

2

Now they do, anyway. After all, Imus said some really nasty things, and no one could have seen that coming, eh?

What's interesting to me as a student of stocks is how all these Imus advertisers are just now crawling out of the woodwork to voice their shock. According to The Wall Street Journal, Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) and Staples (Nasdaq: SPLS) have yanked their ads. Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK-A) Netjets is among those reportedly staying put for now. This is front-page news in the business world, somehow.

But the real meat of the story is the knee-jerk hypocrisy of these advertisers, whose collective outcry can be summed up as: "Oh my God, I can't believe Imus said that!"

Am I the only one who never heard of Imus before he said the bad thing? The way the news describes it, he sounds as famous as Tom Brokaw or the original Howard Stern. I won't be listening to him anyway since I have no idea when he'd be on!

And, once again, we're all spending great time and energy focused on crap like this rather than things that matter. Tabloid News Networks like CNN and, I assume Fox "news" (as they like to call themselves--George Orwell spins in his grave every time they utter "Fair and Balanced") have to choose between leading with this story or more on the DNA results matching to Anna Nicole's morphine addicted runt.

Just like the Summer of 2001, while 19 determined Fanatics plotted to kills thousands of Americans, our news was wall-to-wall coverage of the "Chandra Levy Mystery"!

My personal guess on what we're all being encouraged to ignore this time? An imminent recession. Just like our President standing in the Rose Garden for days after 9/11 telling us to 'take our family to the mall and out to dinner', to "go shopping", the Madison Avenue folks seem to think the ratings will rise, we'll all see or hear more commercials for conspicuous consumption items and we'll all go shopping.

We're in Oz now. Just close your eyes, click your heels three times and keep repeating, "there's no place like home, there's no place like home..."

It'll all be o.k. then. We'll wake-up back with Aunty Em and the whole gang any moment now...

No, not at all. There's just way too much good crap to not enjoy it all. I WASN'T railing on you for bringing it here. I'm glad to have someone with a Social Conscious like you "serve it up" for me to slam across the net!

You just beat me to posting on this one darnit!

Hopefully...occasionally...I'll be "first" and you can knock one back at me at least once-in-a-blue-moon.

Rail on Comrade, it's one of the only things keeping me sane these days,

Greshm

I actually do have an interesting contrarian theory on this one that I'll reply with later...came to me in the middle of the night.